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Talk:Baron Harkyn's Castle/@comment-33763020-20180215123854
It's far too easy to fall to routine in BT 1 and grind the 4 x99 Berserkers for XP, while actually it's not the most efficient way. I did it the first time I played it, but realized how much time I wasted :). Your go-to point for experience is the 69 Wights/36 Ghouls combo in the Catacombs, level 3, for following reasons: 1. While the Berserkers give you indeed highest XP for a single fight (about 60,000 XP for a party of 6 (+beast) versus about 25,000 for the w/g combo), it takes several rounds to fight the Berserkers, longer in fact than twice the 69W/36G combined including the walks, even on highest scroll speed. The reason is mainly that while the wights/ghouls mostly don't get the chance to start hitting you (depending on your level), the berserkers mostly do (having 2 front -line groups) and when they do, you have to wait out until all 99 had their turn. Even with a red dragon as your pet, chance is small he grills them, mostly just claws at one. 2. The mind blades are not enough at one go, so you need some rounds to be successful, even when your bard uses a fire horn (one group only at the time!). By this time, party members or your pet may just have received enough hits to die and any one single death is a waste of XP, while reviving+restoration at the same time may not happen in the right order, leaving your member dead till the end of the fight, missing out on XP. 3. Assuming you do the game in sequence, you don't have any recharging staff yet (spellpoints) and mindblades eat your spellpoints quickly, you have to go back to Roscoe to recharge. On top, teleporting to ground level and back (the only way to repeat the procedure) eats 2 x15 spellpoints, already 30 more than the wight/ghoul combo in the catacombs, where you just need to climb the nearby stairs and back to have the enemies respawn. The spellpoint cost of one berserker fight at best is two mindblades and two teleports, not counting and Restoration needed, so 46 spellpoints the very least, but usually + 28 due to two mindblade rounds and 1 Restoration, so an average of 60. In the catacombs you don't need teleportation and the undead can be killed with 2 Repel Dead, costing 4 each, a total of 8 spellpoints. So a no -brainer in terms of spellpoints, as after a few berserker rounds you'll have to go recharge, while in the catacombs you can go on virtually endlessly. 4. The monsters in Harkyn's are much stronger in case you bounce into a group you can't outrun while teleporting. Assuming you don't repel all dragon breaths yet, the group will suffer. 5. The Bard tune is mostly long enough of course, but if you forgot it just before the teleport, it will not make any sense during combat, as it deprives the Bard from using a fire horn. Also, if your horn expires during the long battle, no song and no breathing. Against the smaller wight/ghoul groups it hardly matters. 6. If you have a spellcaster that just changed class and you do the grind for quick leveling, it's faster to get back to the review board from the cardinals to raise him each level, than from Harkyn's.